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STRONG BAD: Email is like a prison. A prison with no walls... and no toilet.

{reading}

Hey Strong Bad,

I was just wondering what you would
be like in a video game and what it
would be like.

From,
Taylor R.
Queen Creek, AZ

{Strong Bad reads "AZ" as "Alcatraz."}

STRONG BAD: Whoa. Somebody on the inside. {shakes head} Get out soon, Taylor. {typing} What would I be like in a video game? Well, that all depends on what system we're talking about. Like, if it was on one of those really old machines...

{Cut to Atari 2600-style game, with an empty green rectangle imposed on a black screen.}

Strong Bad's statement about bad translation of StrongBadZone is a reference to the ubiquitous bad translation of Japanese-made NES-era games, the most infamous of which gave rise to the phrase, "All your base are belong to us," which was from the Sega Genesis port of the arcade game Zero Wing.

When Strong Bad says "migs and megs of memories," he's talking about megabytes of computer memory.

When Strong Bad mistakes Arizona for Alcatraz and says "Whoa... Somebody on the inside," he is talking about the famous prison on Alcatraz Island (which actually hasn't been in use since 1963).

The phrase "sent up the river" is an American idiom referring to the Sing Sing Correction Facility in the village of Ossining, New York, due to Ossining being up the Hudson River from New York City.

Secret Collect is playable on the FunMachine, while Rhino Feeder is playable on the Super FunMachine. The names of these systems are references to the NES and Super NES, respectively.

However, the jump in graphics quality between the two games is more a reference to the graphics advances between the Atari 2600 and its successors, the Atari 5200 and 7800.

Forsooth (misspelled here as "for sooth") is an archaic word originally meaning "in truth" but now usually used to express disbelief.

Strong Bad pouring his Cold One for Taylor is a form of libation, a tradition where liquid is spilled to honor the memory of those who have fallen.

Although this email was supposed to be about if Strong Bad was in a video game, in Thy Dungeonman his involvement with the game is only through what he types at the command line.

Strong Bad mispronounces the word "ye" in "You can't get ye flask!" English used to contain two different symbols for the "th" sound (Þ and Ð), but the first printing presses, built in Germany, did not contain those symbols, so English printers used the "y" character to approximate the "th" sound in the word "the". "Ye" (the article) it is commonly confused with a different word, "ye", which means "you" (plural).

MATT: So this is an email we've been getting since probably the first week that we did Strong Bad Emails.

MIKE: Yeah, and—

MATT:{simultaneously} Remember when we—

MIKE: For whatever reason, we always shied away from it.

MATT: Yeah.

MIKE: And then, for whatever reason, we just came up with the idea.

MATT: This was like the Japanese cartoon one, we got that a lot.

MIKE: Yeah. Sometimes it just clicks when you read it and some, you just think of a good idea and sometimes you think of bad ideas, like maybe we'll get a really good idea for how to answer the "How do you type with boxing gloves?" email. Dark... dark night.

MATT: Umm—

MIKE: So our friend, uhhh, and, uhh—

MATT: Collaborator.

MIKE: Compat-compatriot. {laughs}

MATT: Contemporary.

MIKE:{laughs} Jonathan Howe, we, uhh, I don't know—he threw all these together in, like, three or four days, maybe.

MATT: Less than that, probably, yeah, we told him—

MIKE: Hey, we had done it early in the—

MATT:{simultaneously} —when we were doing this email.

MIKE: I mean like midweek, probably. Tuesday or Wednesday, we, uhh—

MATT: Yeah. Those are really good-looking kissy lips.

MIKE: Thanks, man.

MATT: I like that.

MIKE:{laughs} Jiggles the camera.

MATT: Yeah, he gets really close up to it.

MIKE: Umm, so this is, y'know, like a vector game, like Tempest—

MATT: Battlezone.

MIKE: Battlezone... yeah.

MATT: The original Star Wars game.

MIKE: Yeah.

MATT: Ohh... there you go.

MIKE: He said, "Your head a splode".

MATT: I think we were gonna make it ori—if you, when you killed him, he said, "My head splow up". {Mike laughs} That was the other thing he was going to say. Umm, so yeah, we figured if we were going to do the, uh, this is all sort of—comes from Mike and I if we ever to make a video game—

MIKE: Don't tell 'em.

MATT: Never mind.

MIKE:{laughs} Nu-huh—

MATT:{slightly more insistently} Never mind.

MIKE:{laughs} We're not going to tell you.

MATT:{simultaneously} I'm gonna need you all to sign a non-disclosure agreement before I reveal this. Umm, so this is sort of, uhh... I remember... what was it called? Vampire, I think, was one of the text games I played earlier on, and that's what had parapets in it. Was the first thing that—

MIKE: Oh yeah, I remember parapets, yeah.

MATT:{simultaneously} And I had no idea what para—I remember, like, getting the dictionary out and, because, I thought that would, like, when I'd fin—found out what parapets meant—

MIKE: That was how you won the game.

MATT: Yeah, then—

MIKE:{simultaneously} That was like— {laughs}

MATT: I would like, it was like the key to it, and I'm just like, "What? It's just like a wall, tower in a castle?" Umm... {long pause} That rhino looks great, too, Mike.

MIKE: Thanks, Matt.

MATT: I think that noise, the noise the rhino makes {Mike laughs} is just that string on a key—on the synthesizer. There's like, it's supposed to sound like strings of a guitar, like when you're sliding your fingers down, yeah, so are the snakes, and they're just really slow ones and really fast ones. Fret—fret noises, that's what I'm—

Tempest and Battlezone are arcade games from 1980. They were famous for their colored vector graphics, which were very innovative for their time. "The original Star Wars game" probably refers to Star Wars, the arcade game from 1983, which also features color vector graphics.